Oliver Haslam·

New iOS 14 Feature Lets You Tap The iPhone’s Back To Perform Actions Of Your Choice

Apple’s release of the first iOS 14 beta to developers yesterday means we’re starting to learn more and more about the update that we’ll all be installing later this year. It’s still early days but there are a few tidbits coming out in terms of features that weren’t announced during yesterday’s WWDC opening keynote.

The most interesting of those is a new Tap Back feature.

As the name suggests, users can tap the back of their device twice or thrice to initiate an action. Labeled as an accessibility feature it isn’t difficult to see why this could be useful to everyone.

There are a number of different actions that can be performed when a Back Tap is initiated. A lot of them are clearly accessibility-related, like activating Reachability. But there are plenty more including waking Siri or locking the iPhone’s screen.

In our testing an iPhone 11 Pro was surprisingly good at working out when we wanted to tap it twice or three times, doing exactly what we’d asked it to each time. You can set different actions depending on the number of times you tap, too.

If all this sounds familiar it’s because similar functionality has been available on various Android phones over the years. This is the first time it’s come to iOS, though, and so far it looks like it could be the sleeper hit of iOS 14.

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